Tuesday, November 29, 2011

More Chronicles in Poor Disguise

Looking over the table of contents at the Los Angeles Review of Books, I come across the reviews of two chronicles flying uncomfortably under the wrong genre flag. Annie Proulx's "Bird Cloud," which her publisher infelicitously labeled a "memoir," and the reviewer struggles to see as such, is quite obviously the chronicle of building a house, with plenty of essayistic digressions and assorted musings characteristic  of the chronicle form. To his credit, Adam Levy, the reviewer of Boris Pahor's "Necropolis," never calls it a memoir, though the editors of the review have placed it in the memoir section. He manages to call it nothing other than "an account." And so the endless groping for a genre's mot juste goes on. People, it's a CHRONICLE!

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